Bill Westwater, chief executive at Xeros, which is using plastic beads to make washing machines more efficient. Photo: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The days of a rogue red sock turning a load of white shirts an unwelcome shade of pink in the washing machine could soon be over.

After last year launching to laundries and hotels a system that uses thousands of tiny nylon beads to clean clothes, Sheffield-based Xeros is planning its next step – a home washing machine where clothes do not need to be sorted in advance and can simply all be loaded together in one cycle.

In March, Xeros raised £30m on its flotation on the London stock exchange’s Aim market, less than a year after launching the commercial washing machine.

The system cleans 25kg of clothes – about 100 shirts – using its bead technology, which cuts down on water and electricity as well as claiming a better standard of cleaning. A domestic version of the machine is planned for the US market by 2016 with a new, improved bead.

When a wash starts in one of the Xeros commercial machines, about 1.5m beads are swept through the machine with detergent and water, saturating the dirt and stains from the clothes. The beads are discoloured as a result and eventually need to be changed after between 500 and 1,000 washes. If there are bigger pieces of dirt, they are tacked on to the beads and then come away in the sump hose of the machine. The beads are constantly pumped throughout the drum of the machine during the wash, falling through holes and being collected in the bottom before circulating again.

“When you think about the laundry world, people have been washing their clothes in the same manner, not just since the invention of front-loading washing machines back in the 50s but frankly using the same paradigm which is basically from the time of banging things against rocks,” said Westwater.

“You need lots of water, temperature, energy, heat energy and detergent and generally speaking, you get things clean. What I could see, which is if you put beads into that mix, then suddenly you could change the accepted parameters of getting a good cleaning result.

“Usually when you talk about cleaning in a conventional world, you have these parameters of detergent and heat and mechanical action. If you reduce one of them, you necessarily have to increase something else. You reduce the amount of detergent, you have got to have higher energy or you have got to have a longer amount of mechanical action. You are always working in those accepted parameters. What I loved about the beads is that they broke open those parameters.”

Since the beads are circulated through the clothes, they give a more consistent wash than in conventional machines, where clothes can become crumpled and washed inconsistently, said Westwater. In some commercial tests, water use has been cut by 80%, he said. As the clothes are washing at a lower temperature, energy costs are reduced and less detergent is used.

Since the launch last June, four-fifths of the company’s business has been in the US, where hotels and laundries are the principal customers. Businesses in areas with high water costs such as Atlanta, Portland and Seattle are targeted, said Westwater. When they sign up, commercial customers are locked in for five years at $1,500 (£900) a month, which pays for the machine, beads, detergent and servicing. The machine can also be bought up front with a subsequent reduced monthly bill. The used beads are later recycled. The Xeros commercial machines are 20% bigger than their conventional rivals, which has an effect in businesses where space is at a premium, said Westwater. Smaller machines are in development.

Westwater said the company aims to show customers that the cost of a Xeros machine is the same as or less than the cost of conventional models. “But because we are initially targeting customers who do a very high frequency amount of laundry and are in high water price areas, we can show them that the monthly fee is dramatically less than if they were operating conventional equipment, while at the same time getting better cleaning.”

In a corner of the Sheffield headquarters are prototypes for the next stage of development, a domestic washer and separate drier, which are expected to be launched in two years. American households typically use machines which are almost twice as big as a UK washing machine and are not as concerned with space as the machines are usually housed in a laundry room, said Westwater. Xeros designers have worked to reduce the size of their machine to the same as that of a conventional household machine.

“The whole point of these is you get as finished a form as possible and then you bring in the big machine manufacturers and then you talk about working with them in partnership so they actually produce it,” he said.

The domestic machine will have a much reduced number of washing cycles, such as normal, heavy and delicate. Head of engineering Simon Wells said that because of the way the Xeros technology operates, the number can be half those on a typical machine.

At present, commercial laundry users who usually sort clothes into whites, light colours and dark colours can mix white and light colours with the Xeros system, said Westwater, and the beads will clean all equally, resulting in less categorising. The next step will be to wash all clothes at the same time.

“By the time we launch in the domestic market, we hope we have got a super-absorbent bead where we can promise no need to sort your clothes,” he said.

The evolution of the drum

The major evolution in the development of the washing machine came in the 1950s with the introduction of the front loading machine, now the standard design in British homes. But in the US, 65% of the market is still accounted for by top loaders, according to Westwater, where clothes are put in through a door at the top of the machine.